It’s a simple fact: We need to track the details of running our households in order to maintain sanity and reliability. Our job isn’t to impress others, but it is to serve others, and we can do that better when we have a grip on the details involved in doing so. A home management binder…
Winter has its soups served with bread and salad, and summer has its grilled meat and salad and…what? Who wants to heat up the oven for potatoes or bread? Our latest summer staple has been bread cooked on the grill. It’s incredibly delicious! And, now the whole meal – meat, veggies, and bread – can…
The tenth chapter of Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer is titled “Drama,” and I admit I was concerned. I rather share Fanny Price’s skepticism about amateur drama beyond the Shakespeare speech or poem recitation. Turns out, my trepidation was needless, because that was particularly the sort of dramatic expression Mrs. Schaeffer is encouraging,…
One of the hardest dinners to make, serve, and refrain from eating while on a low-carb diet has got to be pasta dinners. What is one to do? Eat sauce with a spoon? Make something entirely different? Like my zuchinni-substitution for potato hash, I have sometimes substituted sautéed zucchini and onions for pasta. It is…
It is no secret that I am in the process of losing baby weight, and maybe even a little extra weight that I need to own up to and stop blaming on previous babies. One of my tactics is to forgo starch at dinner. But I still have to feed my family. They are not…
A few months ago I rearranged our living room to make it a bit more cozy, a place more suited for conversations and – of course – for reading. Of course, the trouble with making a place more hospitable to reading is that reading ends up happening there. And, if the point of my rearranging…
It’s time to put dinner on the table and we need a vegetable side dish. A salad seems like so much work, and so does any other vegetable. Frozen broccoli is a staple in our home, as I’m sure it is in many others, for just this reason. It doesn’t taste as good as fresh,…
When, the other day, my son came into the kitchen and asked, “What’s for dinner?” while I stood with the fridge open, I replied, “I don’t know. I was just going to make something up.” In less than an hour we were at the table eating dinner. As soon as I said, “I was just…
It happens all too often: it’s 4pm and I don’t know what’s for dinner. Now, having my pantry stocked correctly and my plan possibilities already lined out (in Simplified Dinners) does help tremendously in these situations. Actually, it enables me to have such situations, because I know I have meal-makings on hand that I can…
A narrative non-recipe from 2010. I felt uninspired for dinner yesterday, which is not a good thing when all you have in the house is ingredients, yet not all the ingredients necessary for recipes. Of course, I don’t follow recipes to begin with, so it bodes ill when inspiration is low. Yet, this lack of…